It's nothing but smelly love potions and fiendish devil worship, a source of menace in B movies, an anthropological curiosity.
Turning a notoriously docile, none-too-intelligent species into a source of menace is an impressive, if improbable, feat of filmmaking.
Like psychoanalysis, it presented the inner life as a force of nature, a source of menace and wonder, by turns malignant and benign.
9.22pm BST 79 min: I said Lennon should make a change but I'm surprised at the one he has plumped for: Commons has been the most artful player on the pitch and a constant source of menace, but off he comes, repalced by Boerrigter.
Television has often been a source of menace in horror movies, but if nothing else, "13B" despite its near-total absence of subtlety, bloated running time and, yes, even the inclusion of a couple of out-of-place musical sequences does manage to change to a relatively new channel.
Yet on a sun-bathed Saturday, the street where Agnes was shot was not without charm; a couple of enthusiastic street drinkers were a source of nuisance, not menace.
David Villa, scorer of the opening goal and a constant source of flickering, back-heeling menace down the left flank, was awarded the man of the match and the tableau of Del Bosque and the MLS and Melbourne City-bound striker, totems of Spain's imperial era, together before the press provided a fitting punctuation mark to a tournament that has signalled that era's end.
Everything coming from the outside world was a menace, a potential source of contagion.
And Iran will duly reap the reward of that, and all the rage, humiliation, and sense of injustice it engenders - those popular emotions which, with the degeneracy of the system, are the principal source of the ever-growing disorder, and menace to itself and the world, that is the Middle East today.
They added: "The Negro race will be a menace and the source of discontent as long as it remains in large numbers in the United States.
Above all, they must avoid the police, who are a constant, mostly unseen menace — a minor inconvenience, a source of absurd frustration and also, sometimes, a serious, even mortal threat.
